---
title: "Narcissism and Character Transformation: The Psychology of Narcissistic Character Disorders"
author: "Nathan Schwartz-Salant"
year: 1982
shelf: "the-psyche"
purchase_url: "https://bookshop.org/search?keywords=Schwartz-Salant+Narcissism+Character+Transformation"
in_stock: false
related: ["kalsched-inner-world-of-trauma", "bromberg-standing-in-spaces", "jung-mysterium-coniunctionis", "ogden-analytic-third", "jung-aion"]
collections: []
content_type: "book-commentary"
key_takeaways:
  - "Schwartz-Salant supplies the Jungian register that Kohut’s self-psychology and Kernberg’s object-relations had between them left unfilled, treating narcissism not as a regressive failure of object-investment but as a developmental field in which the patient’s relation to the Self (in Jung’s technical sense) is the territory analytic work must inhabit—the result is the first sustained Jungian phenomenology of narcissistic organisation written in conversation with the contemporary psychoanalytic literature on the borderline and narcissistic patient."
  - "The book’s methodological move—reading the alchemical *coniunctio* as a model of the analytic field rather than as a metaphor for individual transformation—gives the Jungian tradition the relational-clinical apparatus it had been edging toward, in which the analyst’s and patient’s subtle bodies meet in a third field whose phenomenology is the substantive material of treatment, decisively distinct from the dyadic transference-countertransference of classical analysis."
  - "By tracing the long history of the Narcissus myth from Ovid through Milton, Young, and Swedenborg, Schwartz-Salant locates the introverted potential of narcissism in the philological-iconographic record itself, demonstrating that depth psychology is not imposing an interpretation on the myth but recovering meanings the literary and contemplative tradition had already discovered—the patient at the pool is, in this reading, on the way into Self-knowledge rather than fixed in self-love."
references:
  - "Schwartz-Salant, N. (1982). *Narcissism and Character Transformation*. Inner City Books."
  - "Kohut, H. (1971). *The Analysis of the Self*. International Universities Press."
  - "Kernberg, O. (1975). *Borderline Conditions and Pathological Narcissism*. Aronson."
  - "Jung, C. G. (1955–56). *Mysterium Coniunctionis*. Princeton University Press."
  - "Vinge, L. (1967). *The Narcissus Theme in Western European Literature up to the Early 19th Century*. Gleerups."
glossary_terms:
  - "self"
  - "shadow"
  - "complex"
  - "individuation"
  - "coniunctio"
scholar_prompts:
  - "How does Schwartz-Salant’s reading of narcissism as a Self-disorder relate to Kohut’s account of the bipolar self and the selfobject transferences—where do the two frameworks converge on a shared clinical picture, and where does the Jungian commitment to the Self as transcendent function take Schwartz-Salant somewhere Kohut’s self-psychology cannot follow?"
  - "Schwartz-Salant uses the alchemical *coniunctio* as a clinical model rather than as a metaphor; what is gained, and what is risked, when the *Mysterium Coniunctionis* iconography is brought into the consulting room as direct phenomenological description of the analytic field?"
  - "If the introverted potential of the Narcissus myth runs through Young, Swedenborg, and the contemplative tradition before depth psychology arrived to name it, what does this imply for the relationship between depth psychology and the longer Western imaginal record—is the analyst recovering meanings the tradition had already articulated, or is depth psychology supplying a new register the tradition required?"
seo_title: "Narcissism and Character Transformation by Nathan Schwartz-Salant — Jungian Phenomenology of the Narcissistic Field | Seba.Health"
seo_description: "Schwartz-Salant supplies the Jungian register self-psychology had left unfilled — narcissism as a Self-field whose alchemical phenomenology is treatment."
---

**The Jungian Register Self-Psychology and Object-Relations Had Left Unfilled**

Schwartz-Salant opens *Narcissism and Character Transformation* with the diagnostic that orients the book. By the early 1980s, the psychoanalytic literature on narcissism had been dominated for a decade by Kohut’s self-psychology and Kernberg’s object-relations; the two had defined the field in their disagreement about whether the narcissistic personality was best understood as an arrested developmental line in need of mirroring or as a defensive structure built against primitive aggression. The Jungian tradition, despite its long-standing commitment to the Self as the centre of psychic life, had not produced a sustained clinical engagement with the narcissistic patient comparable to either Kohut or Kernberg. Schwartz-Salant’s book is the filling of that gap. He treats narcissism not as a regressive failure of object-investment but as a developmental field in which the patient’s relation to the Self (in Jung’s technical sense) is the substantive territory of analytic work. The clinical apparatus he assembles draws equally from the Zurich tradition and from the Anglo-American relational analysts; it is a Jungian phenomenology of narcissistic organisation written in conversation with the contemporary literature, and it took its place in the early 1980s as the first such work the post-Jungian field had produced.

**The Coniunctio as Clinical Model, Not Metaphor**

The book’s methodological contribution is the use of the alchemical *coniunctio* — the union of opposites at the heart of Jung’s late alchemical writing — as a model of the analytic field rather than as a metaphor for individual transformation. The distinction matters. Used as metaphor, the *coniunctio* points toward an outcome the patient hopes to reach; used as model, it describes a condition the analytic field must already be in for the work to proceed. Schwartz-Salant’s reading of *Mysterium Coniunctionis* turns Jung’s densest text into a working clinical document by treating the imagery — the king and queen submerged in the bath, the dismembered body in the *prima materia*, the radiant child of the *coniunctio oppositorum* — as direct phenomenological description of what happens in the consulting room when the analyst’s and patient’s subtle bodies meet in a third field. The relational-analytic literature would arrive at the same picture by other roads — Ogden’s analytic third, Bromberg’s relational unconscious, the field theories of Antonino Ferro and the Barangers — but Schwartz-Salant arrives at it through alchemy, and the alchemical iconography supplies a precision the relational-analytic vocabulary, less rich in image, did not yet possess.

**The Long History of Narcissus**

The book’s most distinctive scholarly move is its sustained reading of the Narcissus myth across the literary tradition. Drawing on Louise Vinge’s comprehensive philological history, Schwartz-Salant traces the myth from Ovid through the medieval moralists, through Milton’s *Paradise Lost*, through Edward Young’s *Conjectures on Original Composition*, and through Swedenborg’s *De Cultu et Amore Dei*. The point of the long detour is to demonstrate that the introverted potential of narcissism — the possibility that the figure at the pool is on the way into Self-knowledge rather than fixed in self-love — is not an interpretation depth psychology imposes on the myth but a meaning the literary and contemplative tradition had already articulated. Young’s injunction to “dive deep into thy bosom; learn the depth, extent, bias, and full fort of thy mind; contract full intimacy with the stranger within thee” reads, in Schwartz-Salant’s framing, as a pre-analytic articulation of the introverted journey the Jungian Self-encounter would later name. Schwartz-Salant’s reading reorients the analytic posture toward Narcissus:

> “No longer is Narcissus a youth in a stupor, fixated and merged with his image: he becomes a way to true Self-knowledge.” — Schwartz-Salant, *Narcissism and Character Transformation* The clinical pay-off is that the analyst working with a narcissistic patient is not arriving at the patient’s territory unprepared; the Western imaginal tradition has been describing this territory for centuries, and the analyst’s task is the recovery of meanings the patient’s symptoms have made urgent.

**The Borderline Subtle Body and the Field of the Patient**

The middle and later chapters carry the alchemical-clinical model into the territory of borderline organisation, where Schwartz-Salant’s contribution is most distinctive. The borderline patient, in Schwartz-Salant’s reading, lives in a subtle body whose phenomenology has not yet been articulated by either object-relations or self-psychology — a body whose felt-sense in the analytic field manifests as fusion, dissociation, projective identification, and the field-shifts the analyst learns to register before propositional content arrives. The chapters on countertransference under these conditions are the practical heart of the book: they describe what the analyst notices in the analyst’s own body when the patient’s subtle body has begun to organise the field, and they supply the technical guidance — the use of the analyst’s own imagination as instrument, the slow articulation of what is being felt rather than the premature interpretation of what is being defended against — by which the alchemical *coniunctio* model becomes operationally available. The treatment is unromantic. Schwartz-Salant is clear that the work is slow, that the analyst is often disoriented, and that the disorientation is not a failure of training but the appropriate response to a field whose constitution is the patient’s subtle body and the analyst’s subtle body in active relation.

For any practitioner reading depth psychology against the broader contemporary literature on narcissism and the borderline, *Narcissism and Character Transformation* is the indispensable Jungian counterpart to Kohut and Kernberg. The book does not displace either; it supplies what neither was equipped to articulate — the alchemical-iconographic apparatus by which a Self-field reading of the narcissistic patient becomes clinically operational. After Schwartz-Salant, the post-Jungian engagement with the narcissistic and borderline patient acquires a vocabulary and a phenomenology that the field had been edging toward and not yet possessed.